Fatty Fatty Toad-Boy: A Brief History of the English Insult

Ian Parker’s excellent, profanity-laden profile of the British comedian Armando Iannucci in the current issue (“Come the fuck in or fuck the fuck off”; “I heard there were sandwiches and I’m a fucker for cress”) has made me nostalgic for one of the great traditions of my homeland. I am talking about the art of verbal abuse, a mainstay of English life, to say nothing of English TV, English film, and English literature.

From the Old English tradition of Flyting (“it was with thy sister/ thou hadst such a son/ hardly worse than thyself”) to Dr. Johnson’s lofty Augustan put-downs (“It is little wonder that any fashion should grow popular by which idleness is favoured and imbecility assisted”), it can sometimes seem as though our culture is nothing but a long (and ever-expanding) catalogue of verbal abuse, directed at one source of vexation or another—the climate, the food, the trains, and perhaps above all, other English people.

Malcolm Tucker, the bug-eyed rant-prone communications director in Iannucci’s political sitcom “The Thick of It,” is a cataract of rancid invective, warning a staffer from a rival government office that if he dares disclose a piece of sensitive information, “I will tear your fucking skin off, I will wear it to your mother’s birthday party, and I will rub your nuts up and down her leg whilst whistling ‘Bohemian-Fucking-Rhapsody.’ Right?” But if Tucker curses more foully and inventively than anyone before him, he has done so by standing on the shoulders of giants. Herewith, a brief highlight reel of the insult’s greatest exponents.

1. Shakespeare. “My honorable lord, I will most humbly take my leave of you.” “You cannot, sir, take from me any thing that I will more willingly part withal.”